A bit late on the announcement, but on January 8, 2026, I founded Impachi Inc.
If you’re reading this, that means you’re interested in Impachi!? Thank you — truly.
Nice to meet you. I’m Daisuke Taka. I serve as the CEO of Impachi Inc. I’ve loved games ever since I was a kid. Studying game design and mechanics, figuring out how to beat them — that was my hobby. When existing games weren’t enough, I’d come up with new ways to play, or invent my own card games with a standard deck. That kid has now been in the game industry for 16 years.
Career
My first career as a game producer started at gumi. A planner I was teamed up with for launching a new project was struggling with the design document, so I took it over. I’d been hired as an engineer, but the other engineers called me out — “That guy isn’t writing any code!” — and I ended up class-changing into a producer. I coded the battle logic myself, and I continued handling all the planning too. I did everything. Since I became a producer without following anyone else’s example, I might have turned out to be a somewhat unconventional one. I released a title for GREE called Sangoku!
After that, I moved to SEGA as the producer of Puyo Puyo!! Quest. Back in high school, I was serious about Puyo Puyo. Serious enough to win a regional tournament in Hokkaido and make it to nationals. So I had a deep understanding of Puyo Puyo’s history, and more importantly, I understood what the players wanted. When playing a puzzle game on a smartphone, the biggest challenge is the controls. It’s impossible to bring something designed for a controller straight to a different device. Instead, you trace over Puyos already placed on the board to pop them, then let them drop to trigger chains. It was a change that defied the very essence of a falling-block puzzle game, but I was confident it would be just barely acceptable to Puyo Puyo fans. Tuning a game I had played at a competitive level, from the developer’s side. That feeling is still at the root of who I am.
Next was GREE/WFS, where I was the producer and director of Another Eden: The Cat Beyond Time and Space. At the concept stage, I thought: what if a side-scrolling approach could make a console-style RPG work on mobile? RPGs are all about walking through the field. I shifted traditional game controls to center on the taps and swipes that smartphones do best. I felt a strong sense of potential from the demo, and in an era when “a full-fledged RPG on mobile” wasn’t yet the norm, I crammed every RPG ideal I had into it. I was adding features right up until the day before launch. It felt like the possibilities were infinite. But at the same time, I started to see the ceiling of what I could do within an organization.
At Square Enix, I was the producer of HARVESTELLA. When I joined, the team had zero members. Forget the game concept — I had to build the team itself from scratch. A brutal situation. Well, for someone like me who thrives on building from zero, there was something to appreciate about that. But at a company with a lineup of strong RPG IPs, getting an entirely new RPG approved was incredibly difficult. I managed to push the proposal through by adding “life simulation” as a sub-genre, but it reminded me all over again how daunting it is to create a new IP. In most life simulation games, the setting isn’t all that grim — but I deliberately gave it an end-of-the-world backdrop. Life and death. That was the theme.
I put everything I had into every one of these jobs, and I’d like to think I did my best given the circumstances. But I wasn’t cut out for working on someone else’s terms. I’m just not built for being a salaryman.
I Left the Game Company
In recent years, creating new IPs at game companies has become increasingly difficult. There are several factors behind this. First, development costs have skyrocketed — too high to recoup. Then there’s the lengthening of development timelines. Finishing in three years is considered fast. If the vision doesn’t come together, it can take five or even ten years. On top of that, the number of competing titles keeps growing. Game development has become more accessible, lowering the barrier to entry, and new games keep appearing one after another.
Given all this, mid-to-large-scale new IPs are hard to forecast in terms of sales. Companies are expected to deliver stable profitability, and even a smash hit doesn’t lead to the next opportunity. For someone like me, whose strength is creating new games, it was a tough world.
I could have chosen to nurture existing games instead, but I had no confidence that someone who isn’t cut out for corporate life could just sit still. And so, there was nothing left for me to do within the organization, and I left on good terms. Possibly the most amicable departure of my entire life! No income, an uncertain future — but first, I just went ahead and quit.
What I’m Making
After leaving a major game company, when I thought about what to do next, I found myself wanting to pursue what I’d never been able to do before. That meant making a strategy game.
I’d come up with strategy game concepts many times over the years. I love RPGs, but I love strategy games even more. The problem is, the industry sees strategy games as hardcore, and their revenue is even harder to predict than RPGs, making it extremely difficult to get a budget approved internally. Every time, I had to give up.
By starting my own company this time and developing on a small scale, I could just make whatever I want without anyone objecting! Of course, I might make JRPGs in the future — the genre I’ve built my career on. But for the first title, I want it to be a strategy game. It’ll never become a massive production, but I want to make a strategy game that’s truly my own. That’s why I started developing a 4X roguelike deckbuilder.
I’ll be sharing details about the game itself through this dev log going forward. I’ll also write about the company and the other team members. I’m planning to update roughly once a week.
We’re a small indie game studio, but it would mean a lot to have your support.